Eric Stefani relishes both worlds-and anonymity by Jennifer Vineyard

I don’t think of my friend Eric as a rock star. If he mentions his sister, he does so in a way you might mention one of your sibs: they’re a part of your life, like it or not. If he talks about music, it’s about how he really wants to hear the Dixieland band at Disneyland again. If he discusses art, he tells you about an animation festival in Pasadena he’s dying to see.

He won’t really talk, much less brag, about his own work-how he was the principal songwriter for No Doubt, how he’s been nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy Award for writing “Don’t Speak” (the awards ceremony is on Wednesday in New York), or how he’s already won an Emmy Award for his work on The Simpsons. Nope, Eric Stefani’s just a nice, normal person. “I’m the same guy I always was,” he demurs. “I just like music and art.”

Always an avid cartoonist, Stefani combined his love for music and animation while attending Loara High School in Anaheim. Working at a Dairy Queen with original No Doubt vocalist John Spence, Stefani drew caricatures on the ice-cream cakes while Spence convinced him to get a keyboard and start a band. “I had already played one of those silly talent shows at school,” Stefani says, “and I thought we were really bad. But the crowd liked it.”

Having already persuaded his younger sister Gwen to join him onstage for a school talent show (to sing the Selecter’s “On My Radio”), Stefani soon enlisted her as a backup vocalist. Their first show was at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach. “We didn’t know if we could do it,” Stefani recalls. “The bass player and trumpet player didn’t think we were ready, even though we had practiced for six months, so they quit. We did the show without them, but we were worried. They were better musicians than us, but I guess we had our own strength.”

Within a year of the band’s formation, Spence committed suicide. It almost broke up the band. “I guess I didn’t really know him,” Stefani says. “He was hurting so badly that he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. . . . I remember this videotape of one of our shows: I was lying on the stage, and he was yelling at me to get up, with a lot of anger in his voice. That just rings in my head. Because he’s up there on the microphone, he’s taking control, and because of my insecurities of being onstage, I’m rolling around, being goofy. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re up there in front of all of those people. That’s not my department.”

Concentrating on his keyboard parts was enough, so after Spence’s death, vocalist duties went to Alan Meade; when Meade quit the band, Gwen took over the mic. Bassist Tony Kanal took over management duties, and Stefani found himself in charge of creating band logos for their T-shirts and fliers. He was the natural choice: before No Doubt even had a record deal, he’d already worked professionally on such Saturday-morning cartoon shows as The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Beany & Cecil. He eventually got a break with The Simpsons, whose original animators worked in the same building as the Beany & Cecil people.

Back then, The Simpsons had only been featured on The Tracy Ullman Show and a Butterfingers commercial, so the characters were a little more “square-like.” “They were really childlike,” Stefani says, “kind of like Peanuts with an edge.” Invited to work with the Simpsons crew, Stefani took the job for two seasons. This past weekend, he picked up a Simpsons box set at Tower Alternative. “I spent my life on that show, and I didn’t have any [episodes] on tape until now,” he says. Bart, by the way, is his favorite character to draw-partly because the bratty Bart does a lot of the things Stefani would never dare to do himself but secretly wishes he could.

He also started taking classes at Cal Arts while writing most of No Doubt’s first album, which came out in ‘91. With grunge all the rage, the debut didn’t exactly fit in; it only sold 30,000 copies. Despite low record sales and label troubles, No Doubt persevered, touring and writing enough material for two more albums, one of which they eventually released themselves as The Beacon Street Collection (named after their rehearsal space at Stefani’s house).

Meanwhile, they waited for the label to release the band’s primary record, Tragic Kingdom. For a while, it seemed as if Tragic Kingdom might never come out. Partly out of frustration with the demands of the record industry, Stefani left the band in December 1994 to focus on animation and The Simpsons full-time. Tragic Kingdom came out a year later.

At the time, it seemed like a sound decision. Always the shy one, he didn’t look forward to spending more time on the road or onstage, and he felt trapped. “I like to create,” he says. “But [touring] is too loud, with too many people. It’s too much. I’d rather be somewhere peaceful. It takes peace and quiet to write a good song. That’s what the guys in Oasis say.”

By not joining the rest of the band on their whirlwind ride o’ fame, Stefani has the best of both worlds. He has a normal life, a home, friends, stability, and his cherished peace and quiet. And with the band’s success and his share of songwriting royalties, he has the financial freedom to take time off and focus on his own creations.

He’s spent the past year (in addition to doing the occasional cover art for the Weekly) working on an animated short called A Very Fishy Event, whose villain, a cigar-chompin’ fish(bone) caught by an unsuspecting fisherman, was inspired by Angelo Moore of Fishbone. It’s a labor of love, with the cels painstakingly hand-painted, which is the way he learned to do it from working on The Simpsons. Instead of using a steady crew to help him with the more tedious aspects, Stefani threw parties and invited friends to help him paint. The scene I helped him paint (along with his friend Victor) is only about two seconds long, but since it’s a chase sequence with a lot of motion, it took until 4 in the morning-and that’s without touchups.

Now that A Very Fishy Event is nearing completion, Stefani’s hoping to showcase it at film festivals (Sick & Twisted would be a good start, considering he already has an in, having done the voice-over and music for Sick & Twisted’s No Neck Joe). He’s thinking about going back to The Simpsons, now that they should be storyboarding the new season. And he’s been talking to his sister about possibly writing more music for either her personal projects or for No Doubt.

Gwen, who’s never failed to give her older brother credit for exposing her to ska through Madness and for making her who she is, has repeatedly expressed her wish to have Stefani on the next record “because Eric is No Doubt.” “I’m at a crossroads now,” Stefani says. “I need to see how far I can push myself with my own stuff. With The Simpsons, we’re the working muscle of the show, and [series creator Matt Groening] is the brain. Someday, I want to be working on my brain first. . . . I never thought my stuff would have that kind of appeal, that ‘Don’t Speak’ could make that many people so happy. I want to shoot [A Very Fishy Event] on film. That’s the way to go. I had fun making it; I hope people like it. That’s the test.”

A tragic suicide. A messy inter-band romance. A flop first album. Gwen Stefani and No Doubt have suffered enough heartbreak to feel your pain, they’re just not all that interested in replicating it.

Smatterings of breathlessly excited, blonde-streaked, sparkle-lashed 14-year-olds litter the backstage area of San Francisco’s fabled Filmore. Oblivious to the portraits of Janis, Jimi, and the Jefferson Airplane scattered around the venue, these girls line up to press tokens of esteem on the recently adopted object of their devotion, No Doubt’s bare-midriffed, high-octane, dreamboat frontwoman, Gwen Stefani. “You inspired me to start my own skateboarding magazine for girls!” enthuses one such acolyte. Then she presents the 26-year-old singer with a painting, thankfully explaining the elements contained therein — “That’s the sky, that’s the river, that’s the castle” — and before anyone can ask “Uh, what is it, exactly?” Stefani gushes gratitude and holds the piece out of me. “Isn’t this amazing?” she gasps. Of course, I find myself with a headful of retorts of the “I can’t tell till you wipe the vomit off” variety. I search Stefani’s eyes for a glint of cynical complicity, find only earnest appreciation, and feeling like grinch, mumble, “Interesting. Very unique.” Another devotee pleads to use the phone in No Doubt’s dressing room. Against the advice of the group’s road manager, Stefani lets the girl in. She rushes to the phone, dials seven digits, and shrieks “I’m in No Doubt’s dressing room!”

Such heartwarming scenes of girly empowerment, acted out nightly and with increasing glee during No Doubt’s unlikely climb to stardom, must no doubt be growing commonplace, maybe even tiresome, to the boys in the band: bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young, and guitarist Tom Dumont. Once the changing area is finally cleared of teens spirited, the tour members of the group slump on the tone of just another stop on their uphill trek.”I don’t know whether to wear this onstage or not,” frets bassist Tony Kanal. “How does it look?”

Silence.

“You guys, can I get some feedback here? How do I look?”

No reaction.

Stefani sits in the corner wrapping yards of gauze around the foot she broke during a typically combustible performance the previous month. Kanal, meanwhile, doggedly solicits opinion on his choice of onstage apparel, a billowing striped gray jumpsuit that conceals any evidence of crotch and butt. “It’s polyester,” he grumbles, “I’m sweating already.”

“I think you look cute,” says Stefani, finally, looking up from ministering to the throbbing foot that has earned her a Kerri Strug-like reputation for grace under duress.

“You look like Woody Allen in Sleeper“, smirks Young, whose own visual hook — hair slicked up into devil horns — has recently been shorn into a flat-top. The jump suit is jettisoned.

Showtime approaches. And despite the whiff of lethargy hanging over the hallowed room, this clearly isn’t just another stop on the trek. The fifth date on No Doubt’s first-ever tour as a headliner, a double-platinum-plus-and-rising album under their belts, this is major. In recognition of their altered status, the group links arms for one of those arcane collective motivational psych-up rituals. Kanal gives me a look. I make to leave. “You too,” he says. I link arms with No Doubt while they recite their aims for the rapidly approaching show. “Last night was great. I want to take this one to a higher level,” says Kanal. “I just want to enjoy myself because I’m totally selfish,” giggles Stefani. “I’m not going to dance tonight,” promises Dumont. I mumble something about attempting to be less tardy with my rent check. The quartet breaks out of the circle, slam their fists together and, in unison, emit the cri de coeur, “No Doubt!”

Myself, I had doubt. Two fists full. My first fleeting impression of No Doubt was gleaned from their grady presence among the maudlin, slope-shouldered worry warts enjoying MTV rotation. “Who are these prancing nincompoops?” I wondered. “Who is this buff blonde with the dot on her forehead who looks like she’s just been peeled off the side of a WWII bomber?” I harbored such questions because I didn’t quite get No Doubt right off the bat. I failed to immediately ascertain that they trafficked in a commodity called Entertainment. I forgot — and, after the onslaught of a rock’s funeral last five years, and who could blame me? — that groups could be fun, and if they were fun that didn’t automatically make them pariahs or confidence tricksters. I knew what I had to do. I went back to the smash Tragic Kingdom, with it’s rinky-dink keyboards, farting horns, staccato guitars, and vibrato-spattered vocal gurgles, quacks, and squeals. I removed it from the company of Live Through This, Little Earthquakes, and Exile in Guyville, where it stood out like an artfully manicured sore thumb, and filed it next to Parallel Lines, Beauty and the Beat, and She’s So Unusual. That manner of hook-strafed, femme-fronted, quirky radio fodder was once in heavy supply. Now it’s available from a solitary source. No Doubt is the Last American New Wave Group.

It should come as no surprise that Gwen Stefani and No Doubt hall from the last bastion of Anglophilia. Somewhere between the endless blue sky and the manicured lawns of suburban Southern California lurked a lingering discontent that led a generation to seek solace from a colder climate. Countless Cali teens spent their formative years crying in the sunshine to British doomsdayers like Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, and Dave Gahan. The less pallid and passive in the audience spiked their hair and attempted to modulate their vowels in accordance with the rules laid down by the Anti-Nowhere League, the Exploited, and GBH. Others, taken by the porkpie hats, ticking-clock rhythms, checkerboard apparel, and “Rude Boy” pins of England’s 2-Tone movement, adopted ska as the soundtrack of their lives.

Eric Stefani of Anaheim, Orange County, California, was one of the latter group. Among the oddities he brought home from the local import bin was a picture-sleeved seven-inch Stiff single “Baggy Trousers” by Madness. For Eric’s little sister, Gwen, that record was a revelation. Ask her now about her teenage years and she’ll flatly retort, “In high school, the only thing I was really into was Madness.” She fell for their vaudevillian swagger and the way they dealt with the bleak mundanities of everyday English life — taking the bus, standing in the rain, the British school system — all housed in a romping environment.

A Loara High School classmate, John Spence, was similarly stuck on ska and it was he who, in early 1987, motivated the Stefani sis to form a band. The core of Eric’s keyboards, Gwen’s teeny harmonies, and Spence’s hoarse bellow, plus a few makeshift musicians, popped up at a various Anaheim parties. “We sucked,” recalls Gwen, “but for some reason there was automatically this built-in following. People loved the fact that it was a girl, that it was 2-Tone, and it was me and John up there.”

Tony Kanal was born in India, raised in England, and was relocated to California at age 11. He saw No Doubt in their party-band incarnation, heard they were looking for a full-time bass player, and, by the time the group played their first promoted-and-paid show, had become a permanent fixture. Five months later, he was both the group’s manager and Gwen’s boyfriend, neither of which he currently maintains.

In December 1987, Kanal received a phone call from Eric. “He just said, ‘Come over right away.’ I got there and he said ‘John’s dead.’ He shot himself in the head.”

“There was some problems there,” recalls Gwen. “He was kind of in and out of high school. His mom kept taking him out of school. He wasn’t really in with the bad crowd, but his mom was really paranoid about it. For all the years I knew the guy, I only went to his house one time, but compared to my family, The Brady Bunch family, church every Sunday — it was different.”

Alan Meade, described by Gwen as a “disco-smooth dork,” took over vocals until he purportedly got his girlfriend pregnant and left the band to get married at 17. That left Gwen as sole proprietress of vocals.

Tom Dumont, who along with his sister laid down the screaming twin leads for Anaheim metal-lurgists Rising (“That’s Rysing?” I ask, hopeful. “No, two i’s. We didn’t go all out”), joined the group in 1988. Longtime No Doubt audience fixture Adrian Young became the full-time drummer next year.

The group’s burgeoning reputation as a festive line spectacle attracted niblets of label interest, but it wasn’t until Tony Ferguson, a Brit who used to work at Stiff, home of the hallowed Madness, and who now labors in an A&R capacity for then-just debuted label Interscope, that anyone took a serious look at No Doubt. Ferguson brought along Jimmy Iovine, Robert Cort, and Ted Field, the industry heavy hitters behind Interscope, to see the group.

“Jimmy told someone, ‘That girl will be a star in five years.’ That was in 1991,” marvels Gwen.

“It wasn’t a scientific insight or anything,” says Iovine, a music-biz vet whose presence as both a producer and label boss has loomed large in the careers of John Lennons, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, and Trent Reznor. “They were young. I knew they needed a lot of work. Five years was just a figure. I can’t believe she remembers that.”

Glaring proof that luck laughs at No Doubt came when they set to recording their Interscope debut at the exact same moment from a pungent gust from the Pacific Northwest was about to render their peppy skank about as welcome as a melanoma on prom night.

Packed with reedy rhythms and novelty songs, No Doubt’s self-titled first album was released in 1992. It was instantly embalmed by Interscope. The label withdrew tour support and refused to give the group a green light to record a second album. “But we never lost faith in the ability of Gwen Stefani to become a star,” insists Ferguson.

At the end of 1994, the band finally got the go-ahead to make another record. The album would be known as Tragic Kingdom remained in a cryogenic state of artificial existence for a year after it’s recording. During that time, Eric Stefani left the group — he now works as an animator on The Simpsons — and Kanal relinquished his duties as Gwen’s boyfriend.

Paul Palmer, who had just mixed labelmates Bush’s Sixteen Stone, was drafted in to apply similar sonic skills to Tragic Kingdom. “I thought they were fantastic the minute I heard the music. It was all there, even in it’s roughest stages,” avows Palmer, who was not only a studio doyen but also co-owner of the boutique label Trauma, which had just gone into partnership with Interscope. “I had a feeling about the band I couldn’t let go of.”

In the first sustained slice of good fortune to waft No Doubt’s way since the dawn of the ’90s, Palmer’s enthusiasm saw the group shifted from the Interscope to the nurturing environs of Trauma, where they were, at one time, one of the only three bands on the label. Tragic Kingdom was released in October of 1995. Buoyed by viable record-company, the group set out on tour, which, a year later, is where they remain. Their sweet has borne fruit in the shape of inescapable airplay for “Just a Girl” and “Spiderwebs,” and the Top 10 presence of Tragic Kingdom.

“I can’t believe this is my life,” gasps Gwen. “This is my loser band?”

“You don’t have to be singing songs about angst and pain to be credible,” says Tony Kanal. “We’ve gone through just as much as any band. We don’t choose to sing about it.” He pauses and thinks about his last statement. “Well,” he amends,” maybe we do choose to sing about it.”

“I forced Tony to go out with me,” says Gwen Stefani. “He wasn’t even interested. When we made out that first night, I think he thought it was more of a one-night kiss. But then we started going out and after the first year, I was going, “When are we going to get married?’”

Among the album’s kaleidoscope of styles, moods, and tempos lurk songs celebrating individuality (“Different People”), songs expressing demographic empathy (“Sixteen”), and songs about living in the shadow of Walt Disney (“Tragic Kingdom”). Mostly, though, Tragic Kindom is filled with Gwen and Tony songs. Specifically, Gwen-Left-Heart-Broken-Hearted-by-Tony songs. Vengeful declarations of independence (“Happy Now?”), tear-stained refusals to accept the inevitable (“Don’t Speak”), and the vain attempts to cling to a few shreds of self-respect (“End It On This”). Like Fleetwood Mac and Abba before them, the group’s success has both come at the expense of has openly exploited the heartbreak of a central couple. But while Lindsey Buckingham could pen a stinging critique of Stevie Nick’s perfidy and flakiness (“Go Your Own Way”) and then force the object of his derision to mouth his words, in No Doubt, it’s the otherwise sweet-natured singer who nightly picks the scabs off old wounds for public consumption.

“When we broke up, I still forced Tony to kiss me,” says Gwen. “I was in denial. I might have lost the title of girlfriend, but in my eyes we were still together. For, like, a year, he didn’t have to come to my house when I demanded it. He didn’t have to do anything, but when he felt like it, I was there. It was horrible.”

As female revenge scenarios go, Stefani has landed in an unbelievably juicy position. Imagine, as a dumpee, you wind up worshiped and adored for warbling songs that berate the dumper. And he has to stand there and play those self-same songs! “It’s fucking surreal,” says Kanal. “Think about being onstage playing these songs. I’m opening my personal life up to all these people. But I can’t get attached. I’ve got to separate myself from the music and lyrics.”

“At first it didn’t seem to get to Tony,” says Dumont. “He was like ‘I don’t know, for some reason it doesn’t bother me that all these songs are about me.’ Maybe he liked it. But now I think it’s starting to bother him a little. Some guy wrote an article about us saying, ‘Why is Gwen so sad? What did Tony do to her to make her write all those lyrics?’”

While Stefani admits to phoning Kanal and reciting lyrics to “Happy Now” (“Are you happy now? / You’re by yourself / All by yourself / You have no one else”), this self-admitted Woman Who Loves Too Much maintained intense loyalty to her ex. “Everybody’s like, ‘God, that guy is a jerk.’ which is not fair because he didn’t have his lyrics to talk about me when I smothered him and he didn’t have a life. It must have been hard for him to take when people write ‘How could you leave Gwen, she’s so great.’ But they don’t know me. They don’t see my faults. They just see me however they want to see me. They think I have abs and I don’t. I have fat.”

Lucid and loquacious when holding forth on subjects ranging from No Doubt’s checkered path to Prince’s far-reaching ’80s lineage (he bests me with Tamara and the Seen, I call his bluff with Jill Jones), Kanal’s speech is peppered with pregnant pauses when discussing how he and Stefani found themselves taking up residence in Splitsville. He glances out the window of the Seattle hotel restaurant where we’re having breakfast. Out on the patio, a wedding in progress. He watches as the couple take their vows and it’s possible he’s hearing Stefani’s oft-repeated plea “When are we getting married?” and wondering if she’s up in her room watching the ceremony, maybe even tensing himself for the prospect of her charging across the patio in time to catch the bouquet. He turns back from the exchange of rings and ponders his perception as something akin to a ska-punk Ike Turner.

“It’s very tough,” he admits. “I care about her a lot. I’m not given the opportunity — nor do I want to — to write my own lyrics. But hopefully people with some logic will realize that it wasn’t just me, that it’s not just a one-sided thing. I’m not such a bad guy.”

Stefani claims her post-Tony love life has not been a densely populated affair. But there were those rumors linking her tousle-headed labelmate Gavin Rossdale. “Everyone wants to know about me and Gavin,” she smiles. “We’re just friends. Although he’s definitely cute.” Pondering the dichotomy between her naturally self-deprecatory nature (the inside of her vanity case is festooned with stickers bearing the word DORK) and her sudden ascension to paragon of bare-midriffed yumminess, she continues. “A lot of boys like me now. But it’s not like I’m making out with people, you know, ‘Hey baby, come back to my room.’ I’m the kind of person who would way rather just spend time with my boyfriend watching a movie at home then going out to a party. That’s the way I’ve always been. I’m not used to being on my own, because, like, I’m into it. I think about him all the time.”

Turning plaintive, she sighs, “I want to have a time when I don’t need a boyfriend. But it’s just nature to want someone. There’s nothing better than that.” She pauses for a second then leans towards me. “So what did Tony say about me?”

If existing in an unattached state is taking its toll on the singer, the rigors of the road have left a similar mark on Dumont and Young. As Gwen and I head down to the Quality Inn hotel bar, we come upon the guitarist and drummer locked in each other’s arms, swaying to in-house one-man band Steve Merriam’s haunting rendition of Chris Issak’s “Wicked Game.” Later that night, Young will tell me he’s counting the days till his girlfriend Christine joins him on tour. His anticipation is made more urgent because he’s smuggled a shoeful of mushrooms from Germany for the purpose of celebrating the reunion. As he talks, an inappropriately coquettish, over-40 Asian woman crisscrosses the bar, continually attempting to catch his eye, then making a big show of looking away and laughing. “It’s a lonely life,” he sighs.

Modern Women, a beauty supply store in Bremerton, an hour outside of Seattle, isn’t the most densely stocked outlet in the planet, but its displays of Wella and Clairol are sufficient to elicit an involuntary sigh of happiness from Stefani, who loads up with the shampoo, conditioner, and lip-liner. “I most recently got ragged on for the girly stuff,” she says, referring to reviews that have taken her fondness for cosmetics and naval-displaying stagewear as compelling evidence to impeach her as the sort of pliant, submissive fuck toy of which we should have long rid. “Maybe I should be more of a tough chick. But I’m not. That’s not me. I love makeup. I love getting my hair done. I love getting pedicures. I’m the furthest thing from a rock chick.”

Going on to tabulate further examples of Non-Rock Chickdom, she brings up examples such as her yearly trips Knott’s Berry Farm to see the Ice Capades, her recent trip to Paris where she went jogging without money or I.D., got lost and had to call her friend back in the States to find the address of her hotel and, most heinously, that she still happily resides at home (as does Kanal). “I don’t pay bills. I don’t pay rent. The only thing I pay is my phone bill and my car insurance.” She does, however, harbor vague notions of one day moving to L.A. “If my dad will let me.”

Adrian Young rises from his hotel bed and glances at the golf bag propped up against his table. A dedicated player who prefers his time on the links to his hour onstage, Young’s been practicing for a radio station pro-celebrity game. “I was going to play today, but we’ve got a group meeting,” he says. “A lot of people don’t realize that this is a democracy. They’re like, ‘Ask Gwen if this mix is okay.’ Or we’re doing some TV show and it’s like, ‘Ask Gwen how this feels for her.’ I make fun of these people. I have to do something. I can’t fake it all the time.”

Probably the only starlike indulgence practiced by Gwen Stefani is her predilection for checking into hotels under the pseudonym “Daria Blue.” Nevertheless, her undimmable onstage kilowattage and generous allocation of Personality Plus has singled her out as the group’s Star-with-a-big-S. In the endless obstacle course of their nine-year career, the last and most potentially damaging impediment to No Doubt is that they’re now irreversibly engaged in the process to which experts refer as Becoming Blondie.

Like Chris Cornell, Kim Deal, Eddie Vedder, and uh, Evan Dando before her, Gwen Stefani shines in a solo setting from the front cover of this magazine. Such public acknowledgement for a band member’s ascension from singer to Star-with-a-big-S caused heartburn for the rest of the group. “We want people to know that we’re a band,” asserts Kanal, who is able to recount at some length the number of photo sessions in which he has participated only to open up the subsequent magazine and find himself cropped out. “For many years, we talked about what would happen if we ever got offered this sort of stuff. We’re going to say “It’s the whole band or nothing.”‘ But when you’re actually put in that situation and you see that your friend has the opportunity, maybe the once in a lifetime opportunity, to be on the cover of a magazine, why would you hold someone back from that?”

“Everybody just wants to focus on the girl,” admits Stefani. “I think that’s the one outside stress thing that has come into the band. We’re getting over it. The others sit and bag on me constantly now. Like, ‘On MTV News, Gwen broke her foot last night blah blah blah… and in less important news, Tom Dumont found dead.’”

“This crowd has not yet been rocked.” So pronounced Rob Kahane, co-owner of Trauma Records, gazing out at the vast expanse of pierce-holes and skate wear favored by the audience at Endfest, an annual interment camp with brief musical interludes, sponsored by Seattle’s modern-rock station, KNDD, “the End.”

The previous day, No Doubt played a ramshackle acoustic radio session at the End. Stefani’s voice was ragged (“I’m being visited by a horse”) and Dumont’s playing hand was injured (“Someone asked for an autograph. Then, when they realized I wasn’t in 311, they grabbed the pen back and cut my hand”).

After the set, two starstruck Gwenabees approached Stefani, paying shy homage and asking for tickets to the upcoming dirtbath. She apologized for being unable to accomodate them. They wandered off disconsolately. Then the group’s road manager said he could put them on the guest list. Stefani squealed “Little girls!” and scampered off after them. On hearing of the news, they threw themselves at her like she had attained Fairy Godmother status in front of their eyes. “Work hard, stay in school, don’t kiss boys,” she cautioned them.

I don’t know if those girls were out in the crowd today. Part of me hopes not because they might have caught any kind of disease out there or, worse, the prefunctory sets by Everclear and Filter. But if they were bouncing around near the front rows, they would have seen No Doubt shine among the murk. They would have seen Stefani’s wackiest-ever rendition of “Just a Girl.” Downshifting from the song’s pogomatic power to a skeletal repitition of that niggling opening riff, Stefani adopted scaredy-cat eyes, a trembly-lipped pout — when Laverne wore a similar expression, Shirley referred to it as the “the boo-boo face” — and a cowering posture. Whimpering “I’m just a girl” repeatedly, she prostrated herself on the stage, regressing back to infancy, looking like she might be huddled up in a streaming puddle of pee, until she screwed up her difiance and railed back at the ignorance and oppression of this man-made world under whose heel she’s squashed with a crowd-galavanizing “Fuck you, I’m a girl!” They would have seen Tony Kanal finally sporting his billowing gray jumpsuit. They would have seen the hulking brutes of Goldfinger and Deftones herded on stage to sing along like happy campers with the group’s wedding-band encore of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” They wold have agreed with Kahane when, at the show’s close, he declared that the crowd had finally been rocked.

“I never thought that me, this loser from Anaheim, could have any effect on anyone,” says Stefani after the show. “I never had any creativity or anything. Then, suddenly, I’m what everyone is looking at. It’s such a strange thing, but it’s so exciting, ‘cause I remember the way those two little girls from yesterday felt. You have to keep in mind, whether or not you feel like shit or whatever. You think that maybe if you bring a little happiness to these kids, they’re going to remember that. Like I would talk about Madness, they’re going to talk about No Doubt? How cool is that!?”

Transcribed by Jenny of Beacon Street Online what a star!

SPIN: Are you sick of your song “Just a Girl” yet? Gwen Stefani:
No, not at all. Understand that for years we were this underground cult band that sat in the garage and made fun of every other band on MTV. Now that we have a hit single, it’s like a whole new fresh thing. It’s a really amazing feeling for a band that’s together nine years.

Do people get the satire in that song?
Enough people get it. I hate it when I’m asked what that song is about. The lyrics are so obvious. If you don’t think it’s sarcastic, you’ve got to be like an idiot. What were you like growing up?
I didn’t have a lot of direction. I remember when I was in school, they would ask, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ and then you’d have to draw a picture of it. I drew a picture of myself as a bride.

Obviously, you took a wrong turn somewhere.
The first time I ever performed was at a talent show when I was 17. It was me and my brother and some other people doing a cover of the Selecter song “On My Radio.” No Doubt kind of grew out of that. Originally it just a bunch of people that didn’t know how to play their instruments trying to imitate the music they loved, which was ska. I never wanted to be a rock girl. Basically I have no idea what I’m doing or how I got here.

What were you first shows like?
Very intense. We had two singers then, John Spence and I, although John didn’t really sing. He yelled and screamed and did back flips, and I was like his little sidekick.

Spence killed himself nine years ago. Do you know why?
I couldn’t answer that question. Obviously he was in a lot of pain. It’s really hard to understand why anyone would commit suicide. Mostly I have happy memories about him. He was a very important part of the band. He was the one who said, “Look, I want to be a singer.” He was the one who used to say, “No doubt.” And that’s where we got the name. It still haunts us in a way.

Which is better, the pogo or moshing?
Pogo, definitely. Why would you want to hurt yourself while you’re trying to have fun? Moshing, I don’t get it. I bruise really easily and I don’t like having that all over my legs.

Come on, you seem like a woman who can take care of herself. I bet if you were stuck in the mountains, you could pee standing up.
I’m a pro at that. I don’t even sit on toilet seats anymore. Do you know how many restrooms I have to go to? Public ones? Every one.

There’s a line in the song “Hey You” that goes “You’re just like my Ken and Barbie doll / Your name will never change.” Are you Barbie?
Well, kind of. The song is about me wanting to marry my boyfriend and knowing that it would never happen; that I’m never going to have anyone, that I’m always going to be alone and sad.

I assume you’re talking about Tony Kanal, No Doubt’s bassist. Tell me how you two hooked up.
Basically, I forced Tony to make out with me. This was 1987, we had been in the band only for a few months together. He didn’t even like me and I made him kiss me. Then I forced him to go out with me for seven years. He broke up with me about a year and a half ago, but now he’s like psycho-man, and he likes me again., so I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Did you two lose your virginity to each other?
Oh, boy. That’s private, Kennedy. Please don’t ask those kind of questions.

Sorry, but people look up to you – they want to know your opinions on sex.
All I’d say is avoid having sex with anyone until you get married. It just brings too many complications.

All right, then. Who’s sexier: Suggs from Madness or Gavin from Bush?
Oh, God. Suggs. I have been in love with him for so long. When I saw the video for “One Better Day,” with Suggs’s wife in it, I cried for like an hour.

Do you ever worry that you might be a one-hit wonder?
I think that if everything was taken away tommorow, if they dropped the tour and everyone hated us, I’d still be fulfilled. Because I can honestly say I never expected us to get this far. It’s kind of sad in a way, we’ve done so much that we probably won’t do again. I mean, we did MTV. We did Conan O’Brien. You just don’t go back and do those things again.

Are you uncomfortable with the commparisons people make between you and Madonna?
It gets old, but it’s understandable. She’s the one female artist that really made history, and automatically you’re going to be compared to her. Then there’s the blonde-hair thing. I’m really obsessed with the ’40s and that whole starlet period, but for a long time I wouldn’t wear my hair blonde for fear of getting bagged on. Now I’m fine with it.

Speaking of blondes – do you ever act dumb?
I am right now.

Transcribed by Mike McKeaney of ND Universe.

Bursting into stardom

Cameras, lights, backdrops and props are ready. Industry types have assumed their positions. The air is thick with anticipation as we wait for the stars of today’s photo shoot – Orange County rock band No Doubt – to emerge from their secluded dressing room. By Alison Rosen.

First to appear is charming drummer Adrian Young. He’s clearly at odds with the loud, colorful ensemble chosen for him. “I feel like I’m wearing some kind of zany Mervyn’s clothing. It’s like ‘Hey there! Let’s go party!’” he jokes, winking and making cheese-guns with his hands. He is soon joined by bassist Tony Kanal and guitarist Tom Dumont, both equally uncomfortable in their respective get-ups. The room begins to buzz with whispers, mumblings and grumblings.

Then singer Gwen Stefani arrives. All eyes skate across her unbelievable frame, the sculpted platinum hair and the cherry red lips that twist and glide into an alluring down-turned smile. Stefani is a star- the kind that turns heads and stops conversations. She enjoys the dress-up, the play-acting. She loves the camera and it’s a love that is fully reciprocated. Today she is wearing a minuscule white t-shirt paired with equally form-fitting orange leather pants, the excess of fabric being held together by a clamp in the back.

“Jesus, Gwen, you look like a twig!” Young tells her.

Stefani mulls over this accusation. “That’s good. I mean, that’s good, right?” she says finally,

Stefani is a girl and she’s not about to apologize for it. And before you start judging, realize that with one little unassuming song, she’s done more for women’s causes than you ever will.

“Just a Girl”, from No Doubt’s third album, Tragic Kingdom, is a catchy new-wave flavored song that proclaims the burdens of the fairer sex, using the stereotype to point out its own flaws: “Cause I’m just a girl, little ol’ me/ Don’t let me out of your sight/ I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite/ So don’t let me have any rights/ Oh… I’ve had it up to here!” The song which by now you’ve definitely heard on the radio and which was never meant to be more than a reflection of Stefani’s own frustrating experiences (such as her father’s concern over her driving to ex-boyfriend Kanal’s house late at night), rises to anthem-like proportions when performed live. Stefani, all pouts, poses, and kicks, leads the audience in a celebration of girl-hood, and if only for a little while, the typical foundation on which rock music stands begins to crumble.

So who is the real Stefani? Is she the creation strutting about on-stage speaking in the little girl voice and basking in the sensation of thousands of eyes washing over her lithe frame? Or is she the earnest, soft spoken family girl who, according to her younger sister Jill, “was always giving really good advice about guys and about friends and about the superficiality of it all”?

“I think I’ve been able to fool a lot of people because I know I’m a dork. I’m a geek,” says Stefani, giving hope to geeks nationwide.

“I think [the on-stage persona] is definitely a part of me, but I don’t think that I go around when I’m offstage saying ‘Fuck you, I’m a girl’ and running all over the place. It’s definitely two sides of my personality.”

One wonders how Stefani manages to keep her energy at such a feverish pitch, night after night.

“Yesterday I looked in the mirror and I thought, ‘God, I look so old today. I look so tired.’ So I just put on tons of make-up and screamed up and down the hall to try to get myself worked up and then I went out there and the audience was so intense there’s just no way you couldn’t feed off that. These kids were just on fire. They looked like a bunch of Rice Krispies!”

No Doubt formed nine years ago in Anaheim, California, at the suggestion of high school friend John Spence, a charismatic kid who was in love with the idea of being in a band and whose subsequent suicide forced No Doubt to learn to overcome hardship. The initial line-up included Stefani’s older brother Eric on keyboards (who was to remain in the band as keyboard player and main songwriter until ‘95 when he left to pursue a career as an artist), and Gwen and Spence sharing vocals.

“I never really thought about being in a band. I mean, maybe when I watched Donny and Marie I thought, ‘God, I wish I could be Marie,’ but that was the closest I’d come. John was the one that said ‘I want to be the singer of a band.’ That was his dream,” remembers Stefani, whose personal heroes include Angelo Moore of Fishbone and Kermit the Frog.

“When your friend dies like that and it’s so unexpected it’s very traumatic. I think it taught us all a big lesson in how much one person can influence so many different people.”

The early music of No Doubt was “ska, because that’s what we were into and that’s the only thing we really knew. It was pretty easy music to play.” But as the line-up began to solidify, with “Prince fan” Kanal joining almost immediately, followed by heavy metal guitarist Dumont in ‘88 and drummer Young in ‘89, the wide range of styles encompassed by No Doubt began to emerge, as documented by their releases.

No Doubt released their self-titled debut on Interscope in 1992, an independently produced collector’s item called The Beacon Street Collection in 1995, and Tragic Kingdom on Trauma/Interscope in 1996.

“We were labeled a ska band forever and it was always something we were trying to get away from. We wanted to become our own sound. For the first time on this record I think we were able to do that; to mix up all the different influences without freaking people out.”

Stefani need not have worried. America has latched on to No Doubt’s brand of vibrant, tuneful rock, with Stefani’s smoothly intriguing show-tune vocals dancing in and out of a catchy stew of varied bass lines and guitar riffs. No Doubt is easily the band of the moment, and this fact is not lost on its members.

“We’re just so happy that people even want to take notice of us after all these years,” says Kanal. “We went to New York to do MTV and we were there on the set and Gwen and I just looked at each other and said, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this right now. I can’t believe we’re here.’ It’s really incredible.”

And then there’s the flip side: “It’s weird. [We're playing for] a lot of new people that aren’t used to coming to [our] shows. It’s a different vibe. It’s not as fun as it used to be,” says Dumont, who promoted a well respected club for a short while and is known by Orange County musicians as a strong supporter of the eclectic local scene. “I don’t know, it just seems like [these new people] don’t know what to do, they don’t get it.”

The “it” to which Dumont refers is No Doubt’s roots as an underground band, a grounding all members want to maintain. “It’s like we come from a scene, a local Southern California scene where we play all-ages shows and they’re kind of punk and ska audiences. You know people go to the shows and just go nuts and have fun and dance and crowd surf and it’s a very physical, energetic kind of show,” explains Dumont.

But despite the gripes, “This is something I’ve wanted for so many years now and I never really thought it would happen. It’s like a dream come true to hear my songs on the radio. I know that the music industry and people that listen to music these days are pretty fickle and this may be our one hit wonder and it may be gone tomorrow, but we’re going to have a lot of fun in the meantime. 99% of musicians, whether they are telling the truth or not, want to make a living playing music. It’s not about selling out. It’s about having a little fun for awhile and not having to work another job and getting to play music all day long, every day. It’s really satisfying.”

This spectrum seems little more than the varied emotions of a band in flux, making the transition from local underground heroes to national entertainers. All the members are thrilled to be receiving attention, yet they talk as if it might evaporate tomorrow. They all remain loyal to the local scene which housed them for so many years. And they all attempt to make sense of the incongruous blending of art and commerce, worrying about being perceived as “sell-outs.”

Kanal admits concern over how fans would react to their decision to tour in a tour bus, as opposed to the vans they always used in the past, despite inconvenience and issues of safety. He’s well aware of the distorting powers of fame.

“I think for the most part we’re pretty nice people. I check myself every day just to make sure this is the same person. I really want people to tell me if they think anything has changed about me. I think about that stuff all the time,” says Kanal, who is a few credits short of receiving a degree in psychology.

Dumont harbors the same concerns. “I haven’t been able to hang out with my friends much anymore because I’m so busy. I wonder if they are like, ‘Tom’s too cool for us now.’ They don’t understand that there’s a lot of responsibilities and we’re busy constantly, all day long.”

Stefani talks of the girls who approached her at a recent show, feeling betrayed, and worrying that now “jocks and nerds” would be audience members. “I totally understand that, because I had a band that was ‘my band’ ? Madness – and in some ways I wanted to wear the shirt and tell everyone that they were my band but I didn’t want other people to really get into them, so I can understand that. But at the same time I think a lot of people are really happy for us.”

The genuine excitement the group feels is more poignant when coming on the heals of No Doubt’s “Bleak Period”, referred to by all members in grand, sweeping, epic terms.

“If you would have seen us last year,” Stefani begins, “we were barely hanging on by a thread. We were ready to quit and save ourselves from becoming a bunch of losers.”

These hard times centered around, according to Stefani, “political stuff with our label. The biggest problem was we weren’t able to put out music and it was like three years between records. I remember the first year the band came together it seemed like so much had gotten done and the last three years it was like nothing happened. That’s why we put out The Beacon Street Collection, which is the CD we did in our garage. It was one of the best things we ever did because we were able to take some songs that would have probably gotten lost and document them. But this was awesome because at the very end, when we were mixing our album, we hooked up with these guys from Trauma, which happens to be a subsidiary of Interscope, so now it’s kind of neat because we have Interscope and Trauma working for us. Everything has turned around. It’s flip-flopped. It’s unbelievable how fast it has changed, so we’re just trying to take every day and just enjoy it because we know it could be gone at any second.”

But in the process, No Doubt lost a member; keyboard player Eric Stefani. “Eric was my biggest musical influence,” says Gwen. “He’s the one that said ‘you be the singer’ when I was sitting on the couch watching the Brady Bunch and being as lazy as possible. So if it wasn’t for him, I don’t know what I would be doing. It was really hard when he left because I felt like this was his baby – his band. For me to take over was really weird and awkward, but at the same time it was a long time coming. He taught us how to write songs and we took it from there. In a lot of ways this record has so much more meaning to me than the first one because I was really able to participate, whereas on the first record I was singing songs about my brother getting his wisdom teeth pulled.”

There are many connections between this latest record and the “Bleak Period”. The album’s title is a pun on Anaheim’s own Disneyland (referred to as the “Magic Kingdom”), but the album is mostly about the anything-but-magical hardships faced by No Doubt. The break-up of Kanal and Stefani’s seven year relationship inspired many of the songs.

“You can imagine all the things that come with being in a band with your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. It’s odd. We just deal with it every day,” Kanal reveals. “We’re still really good friends. We were best friends when we were going out and Gwen is really, really important to me.”

Stefani holds similar feelings. “I think we’ve just been really blessed that we can remain good friends. I love him so much.”

“I’ve always thought of myself as being a really normal person, with the most normal life, with a mom and dad and sisters and brothers and a totally normal personality with nothing exciting about it and then I step back and look at my situation and all the, like,” Stefani pauses, measuring her words. “How can I say shit that’s going on and I realize I am in the weirdest incestuous situation. It’s a weird life that I have been thrown into, but at the same time I can’t remember a time that I’ve been happier. Things are so great right now and I’m really enjoying my life, every second of it.”

The music business is a weird industry. The methods of achieving success are outwardly shunned and denounced, though secretly sought after. No Doubt are achieving the kind of success every other band, whether they would admit to it or not, secretly hope for. After nine years ripe with the good and the bad, No Doubt refuse to play the game. “It’s funny, because at least now we’re not like total losers,” says Stefani. “We had a video on MTV and got to be on the radio and stuff. If it was taken away tomorrow, we at least got to do that. Now we have stuff to show our grandkids.”